Columnist Illustrates Familiar Challenge for Human Service Organizations

The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently highlighted the incredible success of an eight year-old chess champion, Tani, who is a Nigerian refugee. In an initial column, “This 8-Year-Old Chess Champion Will Make You Smile,” he described how Tani, a third grader, catapulted from novice chess player to state champion in his category in […]

As 2017 winds down, human service organizations join the broader nonprofit sector in making a final push for donations. Now is a good time to revisit a common year-end fundraising communications strategy, the story of the program participant. These stories often highlight individuals whose participation in a program helped them overcome personal challenges. But as […]

Human service organizations have long relied on telling stories of personal success or struggle to convey the impact and importance of a service or policy. We often include these examples in our fundraising appeals, advocacy campaigns, and media outreach with the goal of inspiring the public’s engagement and support. But we’ve learned through our partnership […]

In the last newsletter, we talked about the cultural models that are dominating public thinking as a result of the current national discourse. Cultural models are “deeply held understandings that motivate thought and behavior in largely unconscious and automatic ways.” One of the cultural models that the FrameWorks Institute identified as being easily activated for […]

Why Not Tell Episodic Stories? In the last newsletter, we discussed the ways that “episodic” storytelling can limit the human service sector’s ability to engage the public in the policy and systems solutions to the challenges we address. Common examples of episodic storytelling in our sector include spotlighting individuals who have either been helped by […]